Have a look around. In the different tabs above and the posts collected below, you'll find my explorations of Judaism, Israel, the Bible, and more. Most of them were published in places like the Forward, Jewish Ideas Daily, Contentions, or CNN.com. A little scholarship, a little personal, at times punchy or inspirational, but all of it trying to understand how our ancient tradition can inform our lives as modern, thinking people. To invite me to speak, meet, consult, or teach, just click here.

February 10, 2015

We may never know what really went down in the warped political zone inhabited by President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Weeks into the controversy surrounding the latter’s as-yet-uncanceled March 3 speech before Congress, the only thing really clear is that politicians acting in their electoral interests will spin our world like a compromised centrifuge. He said-he said-he said.

As with so much else lately, what you believe will be a function of whom you want to believe. In a rapidly moving scandal, every argument and account feels attenuated and manipulative.

What happens, however, when you actually bracket out the prosaic and petty quarrels of politics? Does the picture clear up, perhaps, if we allow ourselves to imagine that all three leaders are actually behaving according to their understanding of their nation’s best interests? Not just a thought experiment, either: I genuinely believe that in the case of the Iranian nuclear conundrum, all three are simultaneously advancing both narrow-political and broader-national interests as they see them, and we are making a crucial error when we assume the contrary.

First, the president. We shouldn’t understate the importance that this administration has placed on reaching a deal with Iran as part of a broader regional concept. The threat of an Iranian bomb, the reasoning goes, is enormous, and the opportunity has presented itself to simultaneously (a) halt the Iranian program, (b) temper their anti-Western venom and (c) offer a path to regional stability by empowering a moderately disposed Iranian government. If diplomacy can defuse the most destabilizing question in the Middle East, why not do everything we can?

Since taking office, the administration has been arguably more invested in the success of this foreign policy effort than in any other. When President Obama held out the promise that Iran could be a “successful regional power” and his confidant, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, called the deal “probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy,” that’s what they meant. So anything that could possibly get in the way — including both the Kirk-Menendez bill that would conditionally reapply sanctions to Iran if no deal were reached by the accepted June deadline, and Netanyahu’s insistence on addressing Congress about the Iranian menace — will be seen as deeply problematic.

Second, the House speaker. It is not unreasonable for congressional leaders to read the last American election as a referendum on the country’s direction, including in its foreign policy. Constitutionally, Congress is not just about immigration and taxation; there are reasons that the Senate ratifies treaties and that the House has a Foreign Affairs committee — not to mention responsibility for foreign aid, declarations of war and the defense budget. Whereas it is obvious that Congress ought to update the president when inviting foreign leaders to speak, there is no call for subordinating itself to his preferences.

In the view of many in Congress, Iran poses a serious threat not just to Israel as an ally, but also to American interests around the world. They still shout “Death to America” in Tehran, you know. Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer was right when he put it this way in The Atlantic: “In the last couple of weeks, people have heard from Prime Minister Cameron [of Great Britain] and other European leaders about the Iran issue. One would hope that people would feel that the opinion of the prime minister of Israel, a staunch ally of the United States threatened by Iran with annihilation, would also be worth hearing.”

And to judge from two recent congressional votes, there is nothing partisan about this sentiment. On January 29, the Senate Banking Committee overwhelmingly voted to approve the Kirk-Menendez bill. The vote was 18–4, and the majority included three Democrats who had previously neither sponsored nor voted for increased pressure on Iran. The possibility that this bill will eventually pass with a veto-proof majority has gone up significantly.

The following day, 75 Senators signed a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry pledging to hold up further aid to the Palestinians pending the State Department’s review of whether such funding would violate America’s law in the wake of the Palestine Authority’s ascension to the International Criminal Court treaty and the court’s decision to open an inquiry into last summer’s Gaza war.

Support for Israel and concern about Iran are not partisan affairs on Capitol Hill. We can easily understand the difficulty many Democrats may have in supporting Netanyahu’s speech when it has become such a public relations mess. But that doesn’t mean they won’t applaud his words.

Finally, the prime minister. Of course it is election time in Israel — but if this can be used to discount Netanyahu’s sincerity, it can just as easily be held against his domestic critics, who feel outmaneuvered. If we leave aside the politics, however, we are left with this: There is no subject about which Netanyahu has been more consistent in the past two decades than the Iranian nuclear threat. None. You do not have to see him as a man of great principle to understand that in this specific area he is nothing if not principled.

Speaking before Congress the first time, in July 1996, when all of us were focused on the collapsing Oslo Accords and the renewed violence between Israel and the Palestinians, he made a point of saying this about the governments in the region: “The most dangerous of these regimes is Iran, that has wed a cruel despotism to a fanatic militancy. If this regime… were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country, and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind.”

This was way before Iran had built 19,000 centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium; before it had built a heavy-water facility at Arak to create a second, plutonium-based track to a bomb; before it had built advanced ballistic missiles for their delivery, or helped the Syrians to make a nuclear facility of their own. And before the administration stopped using the word “dismantle” in describing what it hoped to achieve in a deal.

Now, given all this, and given that what is decided in this negotiation affects not just Americans but also the whole world, does it still make sense that Netanyahu should not speak before Congress as a deal starts to come together? Even at the risk of upsetting some protocol sticklers and those who believe in pristine relations at all costs, should the prime minister really not be allowed to make his case on the grandest possible stage? Unless you are absolutely certain that both the Israeli and congressional narratives are wrong and the White House’s is right, it seems that in the interest of letting all sides be heard, Netanyahu’s speech should go forward.

Let’s put aside politics and hear him out. We just might learn something.

We have reached that moment in the talks between Israelis and Palestinians, and it is taking place around the words “Jewish state.”

Seemingly out of nowhere, questions over Jerusalem, settlements, borders, security and refugees have been eclipsed by something that seems entirely symbolic: Will the Palestinians recognize that Israel is the national homeland of the Jewish people? The Israelis have declared it a deal breaker, while the Palestinians, with the backing of the Arab League, have rejected it outright.

What is the argument really about?

Symbols have a tendency to be, well, symbolic. In this case, accepting the Jewish state (rather than just a political entity called “Israel”) is understood by both sides to represent the ultimate, public and final abandonment of the long-standing explicit Palestinian goal of eradicating Israel, whether through violence or through the relocation of millions of people of Palestinian descent currently living in refugee camps around the Arab world.

To accept the Jewish state is to create the minimal conditions for an end to the conflict. It is to signal to the Palestinian factions, divisions, functionaries and public, as well as the whole global pro-Palestinian machine, that the era of “resistance” is reaching its end.

Both sides know it, and always have. Indeed, since the very beginning of the Zionist enterprise, rejection of the “Jewish state” idea — whether Jewish in character, in purpose, religiously or demographically, or any other reasonable definition— has always been the real core of the problem.

It was the core of the problem when murderous Arab mobs began attacking unarmed Jewish civilians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the slaughter of the Jewish community in Hebron in 1929.

It was the core of the conflict when the Arab states rejected United Nations Resolution 181 in November 1947, calling for the partition of the land into an “Arab state” and a “Jewish state” — the latter expression appearing over 30 times — leading to the 1948 War of Independence, in which Arab states that didn’t even share a border with Israel felt a need to send their armies to kill the usurping Jews.

It was the core of the conflict when, in 1964 — three years before Israel occupied the West Bank — the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded, declaring the illegality of partition and of Israel itself, with the aim of “elimination of Zionism in Palestine” through “armed struggle.” Thus Yasser Arafat became the godfather of modern terrorism.

It was the core of the conflict when, in 1967, following the failed attempt to destroy Israel in the Six Day War, the Arab leaders issued the infamous “three No’s of Khartoum” — no peace, no recognition, no negotiations with Israel — and when, in 1974, Arafat announced in Cairo his “phased plan” to destroy Israel in stages.

It was the core of the problem when, after the 1993 Oslo Accords were supposed to bring a gradual path to peace, Arafat’s newly constituted Palestinian Authority continued to support and fund terrorist groups, preach hatred rather than peace in the classrooms, transform the refugee camps into armed compounds filled with improvised explosive devices and launch a horrific campaign of suicide bombings in the mid-1990s.

It was the core of the problem when, in the 2001 talks in Taba, Arafat rejected a peace plan from President Clinton that would have given the Palestinians a sovereign state on nearly all the land in the West Bank and Gaza, and instead launched the second intifada, causing thousands of pointless deaths on both sides.

It was the core of the problem when, in 2010, Benjamin Netanyahu called Mahmoud Abbas’s bluff and implemented the first-ever freeze in settlement construction for a period of 10 months. The result? Abbas waited until the freeze was almost expired before coming to the table — proving that the conflict was never really about settlements, after all.

And it is the core of the conflict today, when it appears Abbas has rejected every single proposal put forth by Secretary of State John Kerry that involves any recognition of the legitimacy of Israeli concerns — whether demographic, heritage or security.

Rejection of the Jewish state has always been the core of the conflict. It’s worth noting that those Arab leaders who made significant gestures toward ending rejection — like Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Jordan’s King Hussein — were able to reach peace agreements with Israel in the blink of an eye. It was never Israel that stood in the way of peace.

Rejectionism is the problem, nothing else. Unless, of course, you believe that rejectionism is, in its essence, justified — that all the hatred, all the boycotts, all the violence against Israeli children and civilians, is all a “natural response” to the original sin of “occupation,” meaning of Israel itself. That 1948 justifies it all. If this is what you believe, then say so. But speak not of settlements, and do not pretend to have peaceful aims.

If Zionism is the belief that the Jews have a right to a healthy, thriving democratic state of their own, then anti-Zionism is the repudiation of that right, and gets the ball rolling on all the other rejectionisms, including that of Abbas today. There is no middle ground; either you grant the Jews their place among the nations, or you don’t.

Both sides know that without mutual legitimation and acceptance, publicly and formally, there can be no peace. The Palestinians themselves have always demanded such recognition — which is why the “Jordanian option” of subsuming the Palestinian territory into the neighboring kingdom has been off the table for years.

But recognition is a two-way street, and Israel will forever insist on it, as well. It’s not about psychological insecurity. It’s not that Israelis need the affirmation of the other side in order to feel good about themselves. It’s because the only way to confirm that this thing is really over — and that the agreement won’t be another catastrophic failure, like Oslo — is for recognition to replace rejection, not to live alongside it in some ambiguous cloud of diplomatic nicety. Not to dilute it by saying, “Yes, but also right of return,” or, “Yes, but also right to resistance.” But clear, categorical, overriding.

January 12, 2014

By advocating a bold, self-asserting Jewish settlement movement, with or without a peace agreement, Sharon shattered the image of Israel as a country that places the achievement of peace with its neighbors above all other national goals. This triggered a long-term rift with Diaspora Jewry, especially in the United States, where the cause of peace had become the core not only of Jewish Zionism, but even of Judaism itself.

For the Jews of Israel, however, Sharon represented an ideal no less impressive — even vital for the survival and success of the country they had shed so much blood to build. He represented independence, in its deepest sense.

Deep down inside, Israelis still see their own national survival as somehow miraculous, defying the laws of gravity. And that survival is owed to a founding generation of larger-than-life figures — David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin — who created something from nothing, saw possibility through a veil of blood and devastation, acted boldly and in defiance of international demands, and handed a whole country to the next generation on a platter.

Of those founders, the only two who remained active a decade ago were Sharon and Shimon Peres, archrivals in politics until, in 2005, they joined together under the banner of Sharon’s new Kadima party, for the purpose of unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza. The move, known as “disengagement,” was a stroke of political genius, embodying everything desired by the newly emergent Israeli center: the bold, security-minded unilateralism of the right, combined with the territorial sacrifice of the left.

There would be no presumption of peace this time — disengagement was, if nothing else, a glaring repudiation of the Oslo Accords — but there could be a reversal of the vilified settlement movement nonetheless.

I visited Kfar Darom, the largest settlement in Gaza, on Independence Day 2005, just a few months before it became rubble. I had spent much of my adult life supporting the settlements, but by that point, Kfar Darom had become a magnet for the movement’s most outlandish fruitcakes. The folks who had taken over the town in the months before disengagement were old-fashioned messianists, radicals with bullhorns in their beards and demonic sunshine in their eyes.

I knew they were but a sliver of the settlement movement, but I also knew that their refusal to grant the world some nuance, their divine arrogance, had taken the entire idea of settlement outside the borders not just of geographical Israel, but of cultural and political Israel, as well.

So when Sharon, so long the movement’s most potent advocate, decided to drive a stake into their hearts, a clear majority of Israelis supported him.

Today, thousands of rockets and many lost lives later, a clear majority thinks disengagement was a mistake.

It doesn’t matter, really. What counts is that Israel, led by Sharon, took action in a situation that seemed impossible, where most Israelis had felt a sense of collective impotence and defeat for a generation. Through disengagement, Sharon told Israel that independence — the freedom to live and act without asking the permission of the powers of the world — was still possible.

Israeli politicians, it seems, must have a final act in which they turn the tables on all expectations, showing that the Jew is never at home unless he is defiantly reinventing himself, no matter how late the hour. The hesitant and shtetl-evoking Levi Eshkol led his country in 1967 to the boldest, most stunning military victory in modern history. Begin made peace with Egypt; Yitzhak Shamir initiated the Madrid peace conference; Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords after a career of “breaking the arms and legs” of Palestinian terrorists.

And Shimon Peres has abandoned his post as the nation’s most divisive peace advocate to spend the past decade as its greatest unifier, saving the presidency itself and, with it, an important piece of Israel’s self-image. It is almost as though the Israeli politician’s old age triggers a need to prove that his inner soul is still vibrant, that the creative fire has not gone out. That he is as eternally young as the nation he represents.

Sharon, too, needed a last act, and the disengagement from Gaza, along with the dramatic political realignment it necessitated, was it.

Israelis came to revere him in his final years. But it has been harder for Diaspora Jews.

It is infuriating to love someone unpredictable. Israel as a whole has become, for many American Jews, a “high-maintenance” lover: forever insecure, forever impassioned, forever reinventing and on the move. And yet we do not let go, because we know that in such people are the potentialities of humanity forever on display. We need them to remind us who we can be, even when such a reminder is the last thing we want.

Supporters of Israel who have spent so many years reacting emotionally to the tectonic shifts in Israeli politics — detesting Sharon, being embarrassed by Avigdor Lieberman, loathing Benjamin Netanyahu, wishing only that Golda and Rabin and Peres were still running the country — have always preferred a flattened image to a more complicated truth. They presume their ideology should trump the actual experiences of a nation, and they have never given proper credit to the inner Israeli soul that refuses under any circumstances to give up on itself, that fights until death for the right to just live, that will always choose a contentious reality over a peaceable illusion, that will never, ever place the world’s callow and fickle morals above its own truth.

As a politician, Ariel Sharon swerved and maneuvered, at times blunt and at others masterfully deft, never fearing the small or great gambit in order to keep the advantage to himself. He did not care about the stereotyped images, the caricatures that distorted him across Europe and in the hearts of Diaspora Jews. He was not always right, but he never projected weakness of spirit.

In this, he captured an important part of what Israel is really about. And what too many of us, living at a comfortable distance, still can’t handle.

June 16, 2013

Let’s assume that everything we think we know about the recent terror attacks in London and Boston turns out to be true. That the people who carried them out were not actually part of a formal, organized international effort to kill Westerners — that they were not paid a salary by a terror group, or given an explicit order to go operational.

They attacked because they believed in it, but they were not part of a command chain. They murdered because they were “inspired.”

If this is true, then the Western world might be facing a totally new kind of terrorism — one that is highly confusing to our liberty-loving hearts.

People in policy circles have known for a long time about the concept of “inspired” or “leaderless” terrorists, who act in the name of an ideology and not an organization. Indeed, unlike groups like Hezbollah and Lashkar e-Taiba (of the Mumbai attacks), which maintain massive organizational capabilities, bank accounts, budgets, supply chains and training bases — unlike these, a large part of Al Qaeda’s efforts lately have gone to reinventing itself as an inspirational, rather than organizational, form of terror.

Its goal is to teach like-minded individuals around the world not only how to make bombs (as the Tsarnaev brothers did from the aptly named magazine Inspire), but also how to organize locally, how to raise their own funds, how to cover their tracks — in short, how to make terrorism happen without the benefit of old-school organizations.

The effect of this, from America and Europe’s perspective, is to move terrorism into an entirely new place — one that takes greatest advantage of Western society’s biggest legal, cultural and political blind spots.

For the second time in a decade and a half, we may now need to rethink the nature of our struggle against terror. After 9/11, Western policymakers woke up to the realization that they faced a new kind of war, organized by a non-state enemy who could not function without the sponsorship of states.

Because terrorists defied all the regular laws of war, you could legitimately operate militarily against their bases, their leaders, their camps and inside of countries that harbored them, and you could hold those states directly accountable, as well, destroying the terror groups’ ability to organize.

The downside, of course, was that Western countries found themselves blurring the lines between domestic and foreign enemies, deploying tools of surveillance against their citizenry, taking down walls that had separated intelligence gathering from law enforcement. The war on terror tested the boundaries of freedom.

Now, however, the terrorists have developed a new approach, one that does not depend so much on their ability to organize, and one that hits democracies in their most vulnerable spot. Now their warfare is even more asymmetric than before. By using the Internet to disseminate teachings and methods, they have found a way to effect violence.

Once again we need a new set of conceptual and policy tools. Because if terrorists can be inspired without being organized, what makes them any different from other crazy, violent people on the left and right, from Neo-Nazis and abortion clinic bombers to Branch Davidian and Sirhan Sirhan and the Weather Underground?

You cannot single out Islamic violent fanaticism from all the rest without raising the specter of prejudicial hatred of Muslims more broadly. Because ideology is opinion, and having a right to your own unpopular opinion is the very core of our civilization. You can’t ban inspiration without turning democracy against itself.

On the other hand, we also know that jihadism is a little different. None of these other crazies is “inspired” by sophisticated, well-funded global enemies bent on attacking Westerners in any way possible — people who have deliberately developed this new “leaderless” method as part of their war. Like the old kind of terrorism, this, too, is a premeditated violent assault on our civilians from outside our borders.

So, what do we do?

First of all, we need to reaffirm the basic distinction between domestic and international that became blurred after 9/11 — the line between our internal, coherent civilization in which, the rule of law obtains, force is legitimately monopolized by government, and people have not just human rights, but also civil rights, and the rest of the world, in which enemies need to be defeated through might and diplomacy rather than policing and courts. This is crucial because the more our enemies go after the foundations of our freedom, the more we have to defend those foundations, showing both our citizens and our foes that that we will never let our government turn on its own people the way so many bad regimes do.

And so: The Tsarnaevs and London attackers are not “foreign combatants” but domestic criminals who should be given a fair trial in a civilian criminal justice system, just like any other alleged mass murderer. They may be monsters, but they are our monsters. And we should continue to be proud of a system that preserves order and rights even when there’s a war going on. Because if there’s anything that living in Israel taught me, it’s that you can’t upend your whole domestic reality because of terrorism, or you’re giving the terrorists the very prize they seek.

At the same time, the people who inspired the Tsarnaevs and the Woolwich killers are not just teachers, but also a foreign enemy, actively trying to kill Westerners, and they should be destroyed. We don’t need domestic-judicial standards of proof in order to nail them. It’s enough to trust our intelligence, our military and our diplomacy. Moreover, these enemies are located in countries with governments that must be held accountable if they allow such people to keep “inspiring.” We don’t owe them anything.

Both of these ideas — reaffirming the inviolability of domestic rights while going ballistic against foreign enemies who inspire murder on our streets — can be true if we make them true. They both have to be true if democracy is to remain democracy while effectively fighting its enemies. Inspired terror should elicit an inspired response.

April 27, 2013

Watch below as I interview William Kolbrener, chair of English Literature at Bar Ilan University and author of Open Minded Torah. He recently wrote an essay at The Tower Magazine called "Who Is Yair Lapid, and Why Should We Care?" Here we chat about religious return, ultra-Orthodoxy, and the complex social movement that Yair Lapid represents.

Many thanks to the folks at The Israel Project's Jerusalem Office who made this happen.

April 26, 2013

You know, I really do think the
alliance that has emerged over the last generation between the American right
and the State of Israel is a good thing. Having been born a dual
Israel-American, and having spent the last two decades living there and speaking
Hebrew, I can understand the Israelis' need to build alliances with people who
share their commitment to democracy and the Bible, and who have influence in
the halls of high politics.

But sometimes an Israeli must
take exception to the way his country is used in American domestic debates. One
big recent example concerned gun control.

Surely you recall when Wayne
LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association and a man
who rarely chooses his words carefully, spun the following yarn after the
Newtown catastrophe. “Israel had a whole lot of school shootings,” he
buttercupped on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “until they did one thing. They said
we’re going to stop it, and they put armed security in every school and they
have not had a problem since then.”

LaPierre was rightfully chrenked by Israeli officials who pointed
out that (a) Israel never did suffer from “a whole lot of school shootings,”
but rather a tiny number of very high-profile terror attacks on schools; (b)
they did not do “one thing,” but rather a vast array of anti-terror measures of
which the posting of armed guards was far from central. “We’re fighting
terrorism, which comes under very specific geopolitical and military
circumstances,” rebutted Israel Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal
Palmor. “This is not something that compares with the situation in the U.S.”

Yet these responses did not get
at the heart of how wrong LaPrierre was — or how grand is the canyon between
the culture he promotes and Israel’s.

There are three deep differences
between Israel and America when it comes to guns — differences that have
nothing to do with terror and random school shootings, and which should lead
American supporters of the Second Amendment to wish LaPierre had held his
tongue.

First: Generally speaking,
Israelis do not like gun sports, especially hunting. Just like their fellow
Jews around the world, Israelis feel that all life is precious, and even if
most are happy to wear leather goods or eat meat, the idea of killing creatures
for fun simply crosses an unspoken line of cruelty that reminds them too much
of the persecutors the Jews fled in Europe or Arab lands. Judaism always taught
us to avoid cruelty to animals even when slaughtering them—so how can killing
be a part of leisure?

A second, perhaps corollary
point is that Israelis do not “collect” guns. I have probably lived among the
most gun-friendly parts of Israeli society—I’m referring to some pretty
die-hard roughneck West Bank settler types. Even they, during the early Oslo
years when they imagined a massive conflagration between themselves and the
Palestinians about to engulf them, and accumulated weapons in preparation for
such a day — even they never described themselves as “collectors” of firearms.

In my seven years living in a
settlement, I encountered plenty of those stereotypical gun-toters, Orthodox
Jews of messianic temperament who would never think twice before opening fire
in the general direction of stone-throwing Palestinians if they felt their life
was vaguely in danger. But none of them ever really loved their guns, collected
weapons, or even wore them in an overtly public way — none, that is, except for
the Americans, whom the sabras routinely dismissed as kooks.

But the most important
conceptual difference--and this gets to the heart of the matter—is that
Israelis do not believe they have a "right" to bear arms. Israel has
no Second Amendment, and would never dream of introducing one. Part of this is,
of course, historical: While America was created through the federation of
sovereign states which, in turn, were built on a loose confederation of
individualistic pioneering communities, Israel started out as a tiny besieged
state in desperate need of centralized mobilization to keep everyone alive,
where government was first of all the protector of the citizens.

But alongside the history, there
is a deeper reason why Israelis don’t believe in a right to bear arms. Guns are
not seen by Israelis as a good thing. At best they are a necessary work tool:
Seeing an armed soldier walking around in Tel Aviv is neither more alarming nor
more inspiring than seeing a repairman with a hammer in his belt. More often,
however, guns signal a societal imperfection, a failure in the national
enterprise that necessitates the security and deterrence that come with guns.
There is nothing good, in the Israeli mindset, about having to wear our
prowess—and our implicit vulnerability—on our sleeves.

The settlement I lived in had no
security fence around it. When I asked why, I was told that a fence signals
insecurity and invites attacks. “Better to keep the terrorists wondering how
far out we can see them.” It’s true for the flaunting of firearms as well. Even
at their most muscularly militant, Israelis have never celebrated their guns
the way Americans do.

March 28, 2013

As President Barack Obama concludes his first presidential tour of Israel, observers have contorted themselves to explain why, after four years of studied avoidance, he chose to suddenly head for the Holy Land.

Part of it has to do with how different the Middle East looks today than it did when he first took office -- including a series of convulsions so profound as to beggar comparison with anything that has happened since decolonization in the mid-twentieth century. This upheaval, dubbed an "Arab Spring" by optimists dreaming of an anti-authoritarian storm front leaving democratic May flowers in its wake, may in fact more closely resemble a bone-rattling tempest -- a near'easter -- that might not end for a very long time, bringing neither freedom nor peace to a region never quite sure whether such Western luxuries are not themselves a devil in disguise.

Such developments should require a recalibration of the overall American foreign policy assessment. But to where?

The president has been widely described as a Kissinger-style pragmatist, a "realist" for whom foreign relations must be undertaken according to the calculus of national interest rather than esoteric matters of the spirit, shared values, or sentimental attachments.

The new reality, however, poses a problem for realists. If in the past, they intuitively looked to the Arab states' oil and diplomatic power as the most reliable sources of political and economic benefit, today these have become much less reliable.

And they have become as such precisely at a time when Israel has stopped being the beleaguered underdog, emerging instead as a remarkably stable regime, with the most advanced military force in the region and arguably the sturdiest engine of economic growth in the developed world.

Just consider how far things have gone. Egypt, the greatest recipient of American aid in the Arab world, has been overthrown and is in upheaval. Turkey, the keystone of NATO's Middle East posture, has begun what looks like a slouch toward neo-Ottoman authoritarianism, jailing journalists and crushing opposition. Syria is in a brutal civil war that may not end soon, Libya has overthrown Muammar Gaddafi and is unhinged, Lebanon has sort of come under Hezbollah's control, Tunisia just had its liberal opposition leader assassinated and Mali has dragged French troops to war against al-Qaeda affiliates. And Saudi Arabia, the lynchpin of American oil interests, is facing its most difficult financial and political crisis in a generation. All this, while Iran continues to pursue a nuclear weapon that could shift the balance of power in the Persian Gulf and beyond - just when the United States needs stability there more than ever.

Now, contrast this with the remarkably steady rise of Israel over the last decade. Without underplaying the enormity of the Iranian nuclear threat, Israel's conventional military edge has advanced dramatically with the emergence of cyber-warfare, drones, satellite-based intelligence, and missile defense. With its deepening ties with India, Israel has become one of the top military exporters on earth.

Economically, Israel has become a world leader in innovation and a paragon of fiscal and monetary discipline, boasting steady annual growth of four to six percent combined with comparatively low inflation and unemployment. Even in 2009, when most Western economies contracted, Israel maintained a positive growth rate. While Western countries had their credit ratings clipped, Israel's improved; when they saw their debt-to-GDP ratios inflate, Israel's diminished.

True, Israel's economy is still smaller than Saudi Arabia's. But while the Saudis' economy is based on a single, wildly unstable commodity, Israel's economy is dynamic, innovative, consistent, and fully integrated. In investment terms, Israel today may be seen as a smoothly growing mid-sized company in a future-oriented market - like Google a decade ago, perhaps - while Saudi Arabia and the Emirates look more like a large, profitable airline: one that makes money today but, for reasons entirely outside of its control, could find itself collapsing under conditions that are not so difficult to imagine, such as the emergence of alternatives to Middle Eastern oil. And a true foreign-policy realist can be forgiven for thinking that in an increasingly turbulent region, the U.S. ought to be placing its bets as safely as possible.

So the present situation poses a real test for realists. For if they are really as businesslike as they claim, then foreign policy ought to look something like investment, with the periodic reassessment of earnings and ratios and prospects. And while short-term profitability is clearly one important element in choosing which countries to support, another is stability.

Some might argue that the comparison is unfair: Given the $3 billion in assistance the Americans provide Israel each year, effectively "propping up" the Jewish state, doesn't that undermine any claim that the U.S. should see it as strong and independent and a source of power and wealth?

No, for three reasons. First, because the investment in Israel has been far less costly than the huge and permanent military deployment the United States has maintained in the Persian Gulf region, which has done much more to "prop up" friendly regimes than anything America's done for Israel. Second, because the relationship with Israel is a far more healthy one than with the oil regimes. For the latter, economic success depends on high oil prices, which in turn harms the American and European economies. It is far less win-win, far more zero-sum, than should be comfortable as the basis of a long-term alliance. With Israel, the opposite is true: Israel is better seen as a partner than as a dependent, its success becomes part of a rising tide, helping other Western countries grow. And finally, because taken as a portion of Israel's national budget, American aid has actually dropped precipitously, from about 22 percent in 1985 to about 4 percent in 2011. Israel now stands very firmly on its feet--while if anything, the dependence that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE have felt towards the American military has only increased in recent years.

So, what remains of the realists' opposition to support for Israel? They must decide. Either they will remain true to their realism, and see that the scales have shifted; or they will continue criticizing American support for Israel regardless of what changes on the ground, and risk accusations that there never really were any scales to begin with.

We look forward to hearing from them, either way. With President Obama's visit to Israel, we may already have.

January 27, 2013

For a few years now I’ve been carping at the widening gap between perception and reality among both critics and supporters of Israel in the United States. Now that I’ve arrived in Washington for a prolonged stay (a new job, but please don’t call it yerida), I’m just starting to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The immediate example of this is, of course, the widely reported “Shift to the Right” by the Israeli electorate. Now, I understand why many American Jews might be troubled if Israel were turning away from their own cherished values. But if the elections have proved anything, it’s that Israelis never did lurch to the right, after all.

Like so many other narratives spun by interested parties during an election cycle, the red-shift theory was based on a selective reading of the data, and on the accumulation of multiple mini-myths adding up to one fat pile of bull. To wit:

Mini-myth #1: Israelis have given up on the two-state solution in favor of pro-settlement belligerence. The most glaring salient fact, affirmed by repeated polling, is that while two decades ago the two-state solution was a matter of harsh debate in Israel, today it has achieved consensus status — including among a majority of voters for right-wing parties, and two-thirds of Israelis overall. If anything, this sounds more like a shift to the left over time.

Also, if you take a look at bloc voting, it turns out that Israelis have been surprisingly consistent in recent years. If we bracket out the Arab and religious parties, what remains is a left-right divide that gives the right bloc 43 seats in the new Knesset, to the left’s 27 — plus 19 more for the liberal-centrist Yesh Atid party, which, headed by TV celeb Yair Lapid, has a voter base that leans much more left than right. In the outgoing Knesset, it was 49 seats for the right, to the left’s 44.

The Knesset before, elected in 2006, had Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party taking up a genuinely centrist position and winning 29 seats, splitting the rest between left and right. But in the elections before that, in 2003, the right clobbered the left, 57 to 40. So where’s the Shift to the Right?

Mini-myth #2: Israelis are pushing for increasingly right-wing politics: Look at the merger between the Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu and at the success of Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi. What few people notice is that these two developments are actually one and the same — and they belie the Shift-to-the-Right thesis.

The merger itself was much less a policy change, or a reflection on changing voters, than it was a tactic designed to guarantee Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued premiership. Forced to resign from the foreign ministry, Beiteinu Chairman (and former Likud director-general) Avigdor Lieberman was suddenly weakened, and his party’s voters needed a compelling home. Netanyahu correctly calculated that the merger would create a large party unmet by anything on the left.

Bennett’s achievement (if you can call it that) was a natural outcome of that same merger — but you can only understand this if you look from the perspective of a settler activist voter. For while people to the left of Bibi saw it as a shift to the right by the Likud, pro-settlement voters saw it as a shift to the left by Beitenu, whose secularism and advocacy of land swaps made Lieberman’s party suspect in their eyes to begin with. It was only natural that a chunk of them would defect to Bennett, the new kid on the block, but that doesn’t mean their beliefs changed.

Mini-myth #3: The rise of Moshe Feiglin in the Likud, at the expense of liberals like Benny Begin and Dan Meridor, suggests an abandonment of classic pro-democracy views in Israel’s ruling party. For this to be true, two other things need to be true: (a) that Israelis choose midlevel politicians mainly on their positions regarding the Palestinians, and (b) that Feiglin getting the 15th spot on the Likud list will translate into influence on Israeli policy. Neither of these, however, is likely. Feiglin’s bizarre combination of jingoism and ’60s-style groovy radicalism (including frequently quoting Martin Luther King Jr. and advocating the legalization of marijuana) makes him far more entertaining than the old-school Likud moderates; but No. 15 turned into No. 22 once the Likud’s list combined with Beiteinu’s for the Knesset faction. Feiglin will be a backbencher, spliff in hand, while Meridor and Begin could easily end up as government ministers.

Mini-myth #4: The disarray of the left-wing parties is yet another case in point. No, in this case it proves the reverse — and not just because the far-left Meretz party has bounced back to six seats from three. Kadima’s evisceration reflected the inevitable collapse of a weird alliance between ex-Likud politicians and disaffected Labor voters who spent the past decade waiting for their home party to become viable again after the second intifada and the collapse of Oslo. With the rise of radio-celeb Shelly Yachimovich (most likely the new leader of the Opposition), Labor has returned to its historical position as a plausible ruling party — and the voters have gone back, as well. To the left.

Mini-myth #5: Netanyahu will form a hard-right coalition together with Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi, increasing international isolation and making Israel a pariah. Um, when has Bibi ever done that? Given the opportunity, Netanyahu has always preferred to balance his international standing and keep people guessing. In 1996, Netanyahu rejected a coalition with Rehavam Zeevi’s Moledet party — at the height of anti-Oslo Accords backlash in Israel — instead forming a centrist government that accepted the accords. His second government, in 2009, was built on an alliance with then-Labor leader Ehud Barak. Now, after the elections, Yesh Atid has already made it clear that it’s happy to join the government, as will Tzipi Livni for the right price. My money’s on another centrist coalition.

Indeed, if Israelis seem disillusioned by the Oslo Accords and the prospects for peace-through-negotiations, they’re also disillusioned by the settlement movement and the prospects for peace-through-strength. There has been, quite decisively, a shift away from the extremes toward the center.

But you wouldn’t know it from reading coverage of the Middle East from certain commentators over the past few months who, for whatever reason, preferred to perpetuate the headline-grabbing story rather than a more nuanced, if less sexy, political reality.

December 06, 2012

Shlomo Sand’s latest critique of Jewish identity focuses on the land of Israel. Just as his last book sought to uncover the Invention of the Jewish People, as was its title, the current book, The Invention of the Land of Israel, proposes to do the same with the physical territory that millions of Jews today, including Sand himself, call home. This is a daring goal: The connection to the land is the ideological basis not just for the West Bank settlement movement, which Sand despises, but for much of Zionism. To assert its ephemerality is halfway to making the whole thing go away.

Rarely does a scholar lay his motives so bare. In his introduction, Sand warns us that the “emotional foundation of [his] intellectual approach” grew from his traumatic experiences during and after the 1967 Six Day War. Born in Linz, Austria, and raised in espresso-fueled 1950s Tel Aviv, where he was “never truly a Zionist,” Sand was shaken by both the carnage of war and the sudden encounter with all the ancient places to which he felt no connection—Jerusalem, Hebron, Samaria—while everyone around him reveled and sang songs of return. He then witnessed the brutal interrogation of an Arab man caught in Jericho carrying a large amount of American currency. “I climbed down from the crate,” he recalls after seeing the interrogators’ tactics, “vomited, and returned to my post, frightened and shaking.” The Arab man died, and this “banal murder” became what Sand calls “a watershed in my life.” Thus began Sand’s career of national repudiation and opposition to what he calls a “sophisticated and unique regime of military apartheid” undertaken by Israel against the Palestinians.

Sand’s story fosters sympathy for his outlook. But it also reveals the origins of the anger that continues to distort his world. Instead of adopting a tone that is scholarly, exploratory or curious, his writing reflects the resentment he has harbored since 1967. If Zionism included unjust killing, then the whole movement was a sham, an “injection of violent, deceptive insanity” into the world. Too often, moreover, he deploys tiresome scare-quotes around terms such as “Jewish people,” “children of Israel,” “Land of Israel” and “ancient homeland.”

And then there is the problem of his research.

Because it is principally a work of spleen rather than scholarship, The Invention of the Land of Israel might be forgiven a few errors in fact. But there are too many, and they are too important.

In the book’s central chapter, “Mytherritory,” Sand undertakes to summarize thousands of years of Jewish deception about the land of Israel (an effort that has, among other things, the unintended effect of showing us how long Jews really have been talking about the Promised Land).

He correctly points out that while most ancient civilizations were built on autochthonous myths—stories of a people emerging literally from the womb of the land—the Bible explicitly made the Israelites’ connection to the land far more contingent and nuanced, with both Abraham and Moses first encountering God in a place far away, and with exile as a permanent threat hovering over the people. He also shows that the term “land of Israel” is of post-biblical provenance. But then he draws the bizarre conclusion from these that “in all the books of the Bible, the land of Canaan never served as a homeland for the ‘children of Israel.’” A thousand pages of biblical promises to the patriarchs, of threat and delivery of traumatic exile, of longing for Zion “by the rivers of Babylon,” and of a final call to return to the land are as nothing in the face of a blistering non sequitur.

Similarly severe lapses appear in his discussions of biblical archaeology and medieval rabbinic thought, all in an effort to show, implausibly, that the Jews never really were interested in the land of Israel. In the process, he has done more than just distort the historical record; he has replaced it with something altogether different.

But what is most troubling about Sand’s work is not its anger or its errors. It’s the underlying argument: That national or collective identity, once revealed for the racist scandal that it is, can be safely discarded for the sake of a better world.

First, there’s the straw man. Sand was amazed to learn, after 1967, that national identity is a mental construct rather than a genetic malady. But nobody today tries to hide the malleability of identity. Our public debates are filled with calls to deepen identity, to educate, to change attitudes. If identity—national, religious, or the term du jour, “peoplehood”—weren’t a mental construct, we wouldn’t worry so much about its deterioration among our children, or pour millions of dollars each year into strengthening it. Neither did the Zionists conspire to foist a millennial, biblically influenced identity on an unsuspecting populace. They spoke about it openly, wrote about it, debated it.

More important, however, is the fallacy that identity’s fluidity and volatility make it somehow false or wrongful. The truth is, most of us came away from all those scholarly assaults on identity from the 1990s largely unimpressed, for we intuit that we need our narratives—and we need to teach them to our children. They give our lives a richness, a view to common values, a sense of our place on Earth, a mental home—even if they inevitably involve a measure of exclusiveness, violence and wrongdoing. Content to “deconstruct” ancient commitments and lasting loves, Sand never once takes up the question of what is lost in the process—and whether we are really better off having our clothes stripped off our backs in this way.

While trying so hard to deny the Jews any claim to peoplehood in his last book, or to a place they can call their own in the present one, and while insisting that any other position is “morally blind,” Shlomo Sand ends up numb to the moral implications of his own claim: That the Jews as such, and they alone, have no right to be anywhere, no right to be anything. Shall we rejoice at the discovery?